Photo of the Week: Wagging tongues

Harold’s Indy, who quacks and likes to stick out his tongue, enjoys a little game.

Dawn Kirlin, owner of Harold’s Indy, explains how she came to own the character in this photo, who is prone to quacking and sticking out his tongue.

Kirlin writes: “Back when my husband was still training steeplechase horses, we were always on the lookout for VA bred grass horses to claim and possibly run at Colonial Downs and at other venues where there were VA- bred incentives.

“I was following another VA bred horse and came upon Harold’s Indy in the results and became intrigued.

“He was born at a farm around the corner from us, Audley Farm, and had run in West Virginia with little success, but had some distance/grass bloodlines that I liked, Broad Brush in particular (he also has AP Indy on his dams side) As a side-note, his sire ran in the MassCap and won in 2001, was 3rd in 2002.

“Anyway, I “watched/followed” him in my virtual stable to see how he ran and at one point tried to find someone to help us claim him but was unable to find someone to help. Then he disappeared off my radar for a few months and popped up one day in September of 2008.

“A few weeks later, I got an email from the CANTER Mid-Atlantic group that they were going to start covering Mountaineer so I emailed them back and told them if they came across a horse named Harold’s Indy that I would be interested in him, and within a few minutes I got a reply …

“I was directed to a barn in the middle of Ohio. When we arrived, there were no lights— it was sort of horror-movie scary. Anyway, we heard a noise coming from one of these dark stalls and sure enough here was this gaunt, ragged chestnut head hanging down because the ceiling was so low.

“At that moment, a rather large man in uniform walked in, pulled him out of the stall and tied his head to a zip line down the middle of the barn…

“I literally ran to the trailer, got bandages, a wool cooler and a big fuzzy shipping halter and quickly got him ready to go …

“My husband helped me unwrap him and discovered Indy had a huge ankle, with limited flexion, which turned out to be a fractured sesamoid, which we had removed and he recouped while I was pregnant with my daughter.

“The one funny thing the woman told me when I first said I was looking for him was, “Oh I know that horse, he quacks!” I thought, oh, this lady is crazy, she must mean he cribs (which he does) but he honestly does quack— his nickname became Quacker. — Dawn Kirlin is advertising director for the Chronicle of the Horse.